Chinese Hackers Redirect US Search Traffic to Chinese Website

Chinese hackers have attacked American Websites since the meeting between President George W. Bush and the Dalai Lama in Washington during the third week of October 2007. Speculations are rife that the reason behind the hacking could be protests against United State's gesture of welcoming the Dalai Lama.

Computer hackers hijacked widely used search engines from where they redirected surfers to a Website in China.

Those people in China who use Chinese ISPs or are regular surfers of the Web have reported that the browsing instructions were taking them away from Yahoo and Google to the Chinese search engine, Baidu, according to information from the Search Engine Roundtable, a Website that keeps watch on the trends of online search.

The Flickr photo site of Yahoo and the YouTube video-sharing portal of Google were also inaccessible, according to some other technology monitoring sites like Techcrunch.

While China regularly controls Internet content and censors Web pages, the country seems to be issuing some sort of sanctions by capturing the traffic of the US search engines, the Roundtable posted.

Danny Sullivan of Roundtable wrote on the company blog that while there are accusations on Baidu of capturing the traffic, Roundtable thinks this was because China was disturbed that US awarded the Dalai Lama. Therefore, the country was protesting by putting US search engines in trouble. CBS reported this in news on October 18, 2007.

On October 17 2007, Mr. Bush set authority at naught by being the first president of US to accompany the exiled spiritual leader from Tibet in public to call for ending 'religious suppression' in the Chinese mainland.

When the Dalai Lama acknowledged the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest US civilian honor, it further angered Beijing.

Google has verified that its site in China is inaccessible and the search traffic turned away. Meanwhile, Microsoft said its team was investigating the matter.

It appears China is furious about the US' move, so it retaliated by turning away the search traffic from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft to Baidu, analysts Barry Schwartz and Danny Sullivan wrote on the Roundtable blog. Taipei Times published this in news on October 21, 2007.